Foundry Files Blog

FD-SOI: An Enabler of Disruption

By: Communications

April 21, 2016

Category: Technology

For years, Dan Hutcheson has stayed on the sidelines as the industry buzz has grown around FD-SOI technology. “I’ve been pretty quiet, because I never bought the cost argument. I never thought the decision would be swung by a couple of mask layers,” said Hutcheson, who is the CEO and Chairman of analyst firm VLSI Research. “But last year when I saw 22FDX® from GLOBALFOUNDRIES, I saw for the first time some game-changing features. Power didn’t matter five years ago, but now it’s a very power-stingy world. Designers are differentiating on power, not necessarily performance. The real-time tradeoffs in power offered by FD-SOI began to look pretty exciting to me.”

Hutcheson wanted to get validation for his increasing interest in FD-SOI, so with the help of GF, he set out to conduct a survey of key influencers and decision-makers in the chip design ecosystem. In the following video, Hutcheson presents the key findings from his in-depth interviews, where he asked participants about some of the key technical and business reasons to design with FD-SOI, how the technology is positioned alongside industry FinFET offerings, and other questions designed to answer the overarching question: “Is FD-SOI disruptive, or just another process?”

The answer? “No. It’s not disruptive, but it’s an enabler of disruption,” Hutcheson concluded. “The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most disruptive force out there. It will be as disruptive as the smartphone, and I believe that FD-SOI technology will be a critical enabler of this disruption.”